Videos
for the
Fourth of July 2024
Anarchist Alphabet
I can't write up a Political Philosophy.
I'm not disciplined enough to follow a Doctrine.
I don't believe in a Utopian Future.
​
I don't apologize for that.
Doctrines and utopias are broken playthings
in the dollhouse of Bad Politics.
​
The best I can do is get my licks in, alphabetically.
is for anarchism
When I was 20, I fumbled and twisted through
the thousand iterations of Marxism
like a Rubik's Cube.
​
Gee, I thought, maybe if I became a neo-post-Trotskyist
who critques Bukharin over the Left Opposition,
maybe if I could splice Rosa Luxemburg into the Sandinistas and whoever else looks good on a T-shirt . . .
​
Until the summer of 1982, when some scruffy punks
at a card table by the bus stop
sold me a comic book version of
Bakunin's Critique of State Socialism.
It blew my mind, permanently.
Liberals, socialists and communists
say that "anarchism" is an immature cop-out.
Trotsky scoffed that he didn't care about persecuting Anarchists because
"no one really bothered with their childish prattle."
​
Ouch.
Click on the image for the full PDF
They have a point.
Take Noam Chomsky, for example.
​
Here's Bob Black's hilarious takedown of Chomsky.
Chomsky once declared that
the case for anarchism is made by the fact
that he once heard "Jimmy from Revere"
calling in to WEEI Sports Talk
to criticize Belichick's nickel defense.
"Ordinary people have good ideas!" says Noam. "That's worker self-government!"
This has to be the worst argument
I've ever read for something I believe in.
Chomsky thinks we will reach the Promised Land, and Jimmy from Revere
can run the Patriots' defense,
if only the world would read
more of Chomsky's books.
​
If that's his plan to overthrow the Oligarchy,
count me out.
In the Spanish Civil War,
smug commissars
handed out propaganda leaflets
to starving Basque women militias
who were out of ammunition.
"This will help you fight fascism!"
said the radical intellectuals.
The Basque militiawomen
tore the leaflets up.
​
"Look, pendejo, we don't need
your bullshit lectures.
We need food.
We need ammunition."
is for Robert Burns
the Scottish Tom Paine
​I rediscovered Burns
browsing Celtic punk on iTunes
I found the Real McKenzies' Smokin' Bowl,
with lyrics from The Jolly Beggars (1785).
​
Anyone who can write something
in 1785 that holds up as a punk anthem
in 2022 is worth remembering.
See that smokin' bowl before you
Mark our glorius revelry
Round and round
take up a chorus
And in raptures loudly sing
A fig by the law protected
Liberty's a glorius feast
The court for the coward erected
And the church was built
to please the priest
is for Charlie Chaplin
He was said to be distraught
at the comparison between him and Hitler.
They did look a little alike.
​
Hitler played this up, posing as the Little Tramp.
So in in 1940, Chaplin made himself into
a Jewish barber who looks just like Der Fuhrer,
who gets switched up with him
and finds himself before the Nuremburg Rally.
​
He switches the text of the speech
from Sieg Heil to the Sermon on the Mount.
​
At first, Hollywood didn't want to release it:
​
"you never know who's going to win the war"
they said
I didn't even know about this until the Youtube algorithm paired me with it:
A King in New York (1957), made in England after he got deported in the McCarthy years.
Chaplin's 12-year-old son Michael (!) goes on an epic anarchist rant at his dad, inverting the final speech of The Great Dictator into an early SDS manifesto. Oh my god I'm dying.
D
is for Douglass
When Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave came out in 1845, white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote a frothy Preface, full of exclamation points and ALL CAPS:
Garrison meant well, but he was wrong to assume
that Douglass was as boring as he was.
Frederick Douglass speeches aren't just angry and righteous,
They're hilarious.
E.g.: "Many slaves think their own masters
are better than the masters of other slaves.
Indeed, it is not uncommon for slaves to fall out
and quarrel among themselves about this.
They seemed to think that the greatness of their masters
was transferable to themselves.
It was considered bad enough to be a slave;
but to be a poor man’s slave was deemed a disgrace indeed!"
Now that's Richard Pryor-level funny.
​
Check out Epic Rap Battles of History,
best Youtube series ever
E
is for Brian Eno
I have no idea what Brian Eno's politics are, but it hardly matters.
All I know is that this is the album I listened to in school
when I thought about
Hegel and Marx
and how we are encased in time.
I wasn't smart enough
to invent answers on my own,
so whatever I think now
must have come from the music
my brain was marinated in.
F
is for Freedom Rides
The Freedom Riders didn't complain
about safe spaces and micro-aggressions.
​
They went into completely unsafe places
to face down macro-aggression
singing, making good trouble.
​
is for Emma Goldman
In My Disillusionment in Russia (1924)
there’s a poignant chapter “Arkangel.”
Most of her memoir is about her horror
as the Bolsheviks shuttled her around Moscow
as a politically suspect American celebrity.
She slowly realizes that this was the opposite
of the Workers Revolution.
But she detours for two weeks
to the Arctic outpost Archangel near Finland.
​
It attracted no interest from the Cheka or Bolshevik Terror.
Because of its sheer remoteness,
it was somehow preserved as a sanctuary
for what Emma had hoped the Revolution would be.
​
The local authorities didn't order reprisals
against captured Whites,
former Tsarists simply became comrades,
nuns were allowed to hold posts
without renouncing their order,
children swarmed with affection
over their anarchist schoolteacher,
no one cared about Lenin-Trotsky-Zinoviev power struggles,
even though food was scarce and winter set in,
the small town was happy.
They shared food and put on plays,
like some anarcho-socialist Brigadoon.
A metaphor, I guess.
Like there are always places in time, Arkangel, Arden,
hidden away from the usual tragedies of power and cruelty.
At a Socialist conference in 1890, a band played and I danced with abandon.
A serious young man took me aside.
With a grave face, he whispered that it did not behoove an agitator to dance.
My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
It would show I was not properly ashamed of my petty-bourgeois background.
I grew furious.
“I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world –
prisons, persecution, everything.
Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.
- Emma Goldman, Living My Life
is for Hegel
I wrote my thesis on Hegel.
​
I bought the Big-Picture model of History,
the galactic movement of huge inexorable forces
filtered through Marx.
​
But where does that leave us ants
scuttling inside the anthill?
What do we who are trapped in history
get to know about where we are,
and where we're going?
Check out Corey Mohler's hilarious Existential Comics
I
is for Industrial Workers of the World
Fun fact:
The Simpsons is partly based on
Mr. Block, an IWW comic book from 1910.
​
The IWW didn't put out propaganda telling workers how to become
model anarchists.
​
Instead, their comics followed
a naive Homer Simpson character
Mr. Block, who loves the boss
and trusts in capitalism and the Flag.
​
D'oh!
J
is for Chuck Jones
In 1969, I was seven years old.
I didn't know much about Woodstock or the Weather Underground, but I learned everything I know about politics
from Saturday morning cartoons.
​
I hated the superhero stuff.
Even at seven years old I could tell that
Superman and Johnny Quest
was bullshit propaganda.
​
But God did I love Roadrunner cartoons.
My grade school teacher disapproved.
"Those cartoons are too violent."
People who see Roadrunner as violent
are identifying with the wrong character.
​
No, there's something Gandhian about it.
The Roadrunner harms no one.
He just steps away, refuses to participate.
and lets violence react against itself.
​
"Whosoever diggeth a pit, shall fall in it."
Roadrunner was based on a 1944 campaign cartoon Chuck Jones did for the United Auto Workers supporting FDR.
​
A Republican Senator keeps trying to hypnotize an innocent union worker, but every trick blows up on him, hoist on his own petard.
​
Roadrunner was Chuck Jones's sublimation of this
New Deal cheekiness into a format that
the House Un-American Activities Committee
couldn't reach.
There is more joyful postmodernism in Roadrunner than in all of Derrida and Foucault.
​
Like when Wile E. Coyote paints a tunnel on a mountain, and then the Roadrunner runs into the painted tunnel. When Wile E. goes after him, POW! He smashes into his own violent reality.
The oppressor thinks he controls
reality and illusion, but sometimes
we are more maneuverable, and faster.
Beep-beep!
is for Kronstadt
March 1921: the sailors of the Kronstadt naval base, spearhead of the 1917 October Revolution, rise up against the Bolsheviks.
Trotsky sends in the Red Army to wipe them out. The slogan of the sailors' council
All Power to the Soviets is counter-revolutionary now, says Trotsky, because the Party is the only power that matters. Anyone resisting the Party is an agent of the Whites. There's a hilarious exchange between Trotsky and Emma Goldman writing from their respective exiles in 1938. Trotsky says humph, look at all these liberal hypocrites weeping for those anarchist traitors. Sure in 1917 they were the leading element of the Revolution, but by 1921 they were just a bunch of degenerate hippies "including a great percentage of completely demoralized elements, wearing showy bell-bottom pants and sporty haircuts."
Emma Goldman wasn't going to take that lying down.
She wrote a response:
​
"Leon Trotsky quotes Marx,
'that it is impossible to judge either parties or people
by what they say about themselves.'
​
How pathetic that he does not realise how much this applies to him!
No man among the Bolsheviks has boasted so incessantly
of his share in the Russian Revolution as Leon Trotsky.
Yet now he sits in exile, on the dustbin of history.
By this criterion of his great teacher,
one would have to declare all Leon Trotsky's writing to be worthless ...
Trotsky ridicules the demands of the sailors for Free Soviets.
Actually the free Soviets had ceased to exist at an early stage,
as had the Trade Unions and the co-operatives.
They had all been broken on the wheel of the Bolshevik State machine."
"A mouth is always muzzled
by the food
it eats to live"
​
-Martin Carter
L
is for Lucarelli
Cristiano Lucarelli is an Italian soccer star from Livorno,
a small factory town with a struggling team
at the bottom of the Italian Serie A League.
Livorno’s fans are the leading opposition
to hooligan violence in Italy.
Every Livorno match is an anti-fascist carnival.
The big corporate teams, AC Milan, Roma, Torino, offered Lucarelli huge contracts,
but he turned them down to play for Livorno at half the price.
When reporters asked why, he said:
“Some players spend their money on Ferraris and yachts.
I spent mine on a Livorno jersey!”
is for Jean Moulin
Illustrator of children’s books who became the leader of the French Resistance.
In 1943 he was captured and interrogated by
SS Captain Klaus Barbie. According to Gestapo records,
Barbie gave Moulin a pencil and demanded a list of Resistance safe houses on pain of torture.
Moulin scribbled furiously for an hour, then handed back
a pornographic cartoon showing Klaus Barbie
getting a blow job from his adjutant.
Barbie was so enraged he shot Moulin on the spot, stupidly keeping the names in Moulin's head safe.
But for Moulin's cartoon,
the Resistance would have been wiped out.
Moulin was the model for
Viktor Lazlo in Casablanca.
is for Nietzsche
Either a fascist mistaken for an anarchist, or an anarchist mistaken for a fascist.
It depends on how seriously
you take him.
Check out Nietzsche Family Circus, randomized pairings of Family Circus cartoons and Friedrich Nietzsche quotes
FAMILY at dinner.
​
SON just had his wisdom teeth out.
He holds an ice pack against his cheek.
MOTHER: "it's very important that you don't laugh."
​
SON and FATHER break into mutual smirk, flashing back to Monty Python DVDs they secretly watch at bedtime instead of stories.
​
FATHER bites his lip, contorting his face to avoid laughing.
​
MOTHER: "What are you grimacing at?"
​
FATHER: "Sorry, just thinking about how
suffering is the human condition."
​
SON struggling against his laugh, in a Novocaine slur:
"Yeth, we are born intho dethspair, only to die alone."
​
FATHER spits out his soup, snorting some through his nose.
​
SON, red-faced, surrenders to painful, convulsive laughter
OW OW OW OW.
Now that's my kind of existentialism.
O
is for Orwell
My biggest hero,
the voice I most want to imitate
I had read Animal Farm and 1984 in school, of course,
but at first I took them as so much Cold War propaganda.
​
It's the Essays that found me out in the summer of 1986.
I was clerking for the Steelworkers Legal Dept. in Pittsburgh,
assigned to write flowery resolutions for the Union Convention.
​
I wrote something New Lefty about
opposing the military-industrial complex,
until my supervisor said:
"Now slow down there, son.
There's a lot of good union steel in those missiles."
That weekend in a used bookshop,
the four-volume Essays were waiting for me,
If I have a Bible it's the Essays.
​
I hate it when neocons claim Orwell for their own -
"No!" I want to say. "He's mine! MINE!"
is for Parodic Fair Use
The San Diego Chicken is a baseball entertainer.
One night between innings at a Texas Ranger game,
the Chicken has a guy in a purple dinosaur costume
walk out to the Barney theme “I Love You, You Love Me.”
The Chicken proceeds to beat Barney up,
kicking and punching his huge purple Styrofoam head,
whacking him senseless with a foam rubber bat.
The crowd goes wild.
Lyons Partnership, L.P., owners of the Barney the Dinosaur™ franchise,
file a federal lawsuit against the San Diego Chicken, aka Ted Giannoulas.
Their main claims are copyright infringement and “trademark disparagement.”
They argue that the mental image of Barney
has been tarnished by the Chicken’s assault.
They file affidavits from parents of traumatized children:
“My daughter cried, ‘They’re hurting Barney!’”
The Chicken’s lawyers counter with affidavits from child psychologists,
who testify that Barney should be beaten up.
The Fifth Circuit held that the Chicken was making
a legitimate political comment:
​
“Perhaps the most insightful criticism regarding Barney
is that his shows do not assist children in learning
to deal with negative feelings and emotions.
As one commentator puts it, the real danger from Barney is
‘denial: the refusal to recognize the existence of unpleasant realities.
For along with his steady diet of giggles and unconditional love,
Barney offers our children a one-dimensional world
where everyone must be happy and everything must be resolved right away.’"
The Court held that the Chicken wasn’t stealing Barney’s image,
he was just whacking it upside the head.
Fair use
​Notwithstanding the provisions of the Copyright Act, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies , for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
is for Quantum Mechanics
Marxism can't handle the Multiverse.
It assumes there is only one historical timeline.
We apparently get to pick among infinite branching paths
in Time going forward- that's what free will is all about, right?
But the past seems frozen- everything leading up to Now was inevitable, and it couldn't have been any other way.
Marxists claim to know the Big Purpose of History,
so they twist themselves into knots
to explain human agency without disrupting
the Unified Narrative That Explains Everything.
But what would Lenin have said about quantum mechanics, the math that implies the Multiverse? What does the Revolution look like if we are operating on every possible timeline - where the Muslims conquer Europe in 732 or 1492, where the Spanish Armada wins, where Kerensky defeats Germany, where Stalin dies of tuberculosis in 1919? What's left of the March of History if random events turn Time into chaos?
Sartre says that every choice murders all the worlds left unchosen.
The 20th Century was cursed by the idea from Lenin to Mao, from Rhodes to Himmler to Kissinger to Milosevic, that we should murder intelligently -
follow the Correct Line, close off all paths that don't lead to Victory.
​
Physicists mutter darkly about the appeal of Quantum Suicide. If we believe we are navigating the Multiverse, why bother living in realities that are less than perfect?
​
Here's a love story that answers them:
is for the
Real
Picasso Museum
On our honeymoon in Paris 1998,
we were walking into the Picasso Museum,
when we got accosted
by a squatter artist collective
who had taken up temporary residence
in an abandoned tenement
across the street.
They hailed us in a whisper,
like drug-dealers:
"hey, American tourists,
you want to see some REAL art?"
And for an hour we wandered
through a Brigadoon landscape
of wild anarcho-futurist installations like this one:
a tie rack with the sign
"hanging ties announce the death of the bureaucracy."
Afterward, the Musee Picasso seemed
so tame and bourgeois.
S
is for Joe Strummer
We shouldn't idolize him.
That would contradict what the Clash were saying. Some of those tracks in the later albums were,
let's face it, preachy and self-indulgent.
​
But those first three albums -
in 1977 when everyone else was sticking
safety pins in their faces, when Sid Vicious wore
swastika T-shirts and pretended he was a rebel,
Joe Strummer sang us real revolution.
When Trump was elected, Henry Rollins said
"don't be afraid. These are the times that
Joe Strummer was training you for."
The future is unwritten
is for Toussaint L'Overture
Grande Riviere
This October 15, 1791
​
To M. Biassou, brigadier of the Army at Grand Boucan
​
My very dear friend:
​
In keeping with the request
I just made of the Spanish and daily awaiting the thing I asked for,
I would like to have crowbars in order to have the rocks of the mountains of Haut du Cap fall to prevent the slaveowners’ forces from approaching us, for I think they have no other means without exposing their people
to a slaughter.
I ask that you make sure with the spy you have sent to have him clearly explain where the powder works are in Haut du Cap so we can succeed in taking the powder works.
Thus my friend you can see if I took precautions in this affair you can tell this to Bouqueman. If you need tafia I will send you some when you'd like, but try to use it sparingly.
Send me a few barrows for I need them to transport wood to put up cabins for my people.
I ask you to assure your mother and sister of my humble respect.
I have the honor, my dear friend, of being your very humble, obedient servant - Toussaint
"It was the slave revolt in Haiti that tied Napoleon’s soldiers down. It was Toussaint L’Ouverture who forced Napoleon to sell half of the American continent to the United States. Without Toussaint, the United States wouldn't exist. That is the history they don't teach us."
- Malcolm X
​
Toussaint declared he was a soldier of the French Revolution fighting for the Rights of Man:.
He was a better Jacobin than Robespierre,
a better general than Napoleon.
His military dispatches are thrilling, like his urgent message to Bissou in 1791 asking for crowbars to dislodge the rocks
over the pass at Haut du Cap to fall on the slaveowners' army. Maybe people would remember the Haitian Revolution better if Hollywood made it a cool war movie, starring Idris Elba -
"Send me Crowbars!" with cool explosions.
​
I once got scolded by anxious white friends after performing a play on Toussaint in 2010 with Haitian poet Charlot Lucien.
​
They said I don't get to identify with Toussaint:
"This is not your story to tell! Just dwell on the shame of all the Evil White Guy DNA inside us!"
​
I said no, this is the very quarantine we did the play to break.
​
I identify with Toussaint because I identify with
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite,
and neither Trump nor the woke police
can stop me from doing that.
is for the Ukrainian Cossacks' Reply to Sultan Mehmed IV
In 1676, Sultan Mehmed IV
demanded the surrender of
the Zaphorozhian Cossacks of Ukraine:
As the Sultan; brother of the sun and moon; grandson and viceroy of God; ruler of the kingdoms of Macedonia, Babylon, Jerusalem, Upper and Lower Egypt; emperor of emperors; sovereign of sovereigns – I command you,
the Zaporogian Cossacks,
to submit to me voluntarily
and without any resistance.
The Cossacks wrote this reply:
O sultan, Turkish devil, secretary to Lucifer himself.
What the devil kind of knight are thou,
that canst not slay a hedgehog with your naked arse?
The devil shits, and your army eats it.
Thou shalt not, thou son of a whore, make subjects of us;
we have no fear of your army,
by land and by sea we will battle with thee.
Fuck your mother, thou Babylonian scullion,
Macedonian wheelwright, brewer of Jerusalem,
goat-fucker of Alexandria,
swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt,
pig of Armenia, Podolian thief,
catamite of Tartary, hangman of Kamyanets,
and fool of all the world and underworld,
an idiot before God, grandson of the Serpent,
and the crick in our dick.
Pig’s snout, mare’s arse,
slaughterhouse cur, unchristened brow,
screw thine own mother!
So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife.
Now we’ll conclude, for we don’t know the date
and don’t own a calendar;
the moon’s in the sky, the year with the Lord,
the day’s the same over here as it is over there;
for this kiss our ass!
– Koshovyi otaman Ivan Sirko,
with the whole Zaporozhian Host
V
is for Villa's rejected offer
On Dec. 7, 1914, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata met at the Presidential Palace in Mexico City, surrounded by their rebel armies.
Pancho Villa wanted to take turns sitting on the presidential throne for photographs.
“I didn’t fight for that,” said Zapata.
“We should burn that chair.”
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W
is for Mary Wollstonecraft
The female Tom Paine
first-wave feminist trapped in the 18th Century
Hapless woman!
what can be expected from you,
when the beings on whom you naturally depend for reason and support, have all an interest in deceiving thee!
This is the root of the evil
that has shed a corroding mildew
on all your virtues; and blighting in the bud your opening faculties, has rendered you a weak thing!
is for Malcolm
In essence we want one thing.
We declare our right on this earth to be a man,
to be a human being, to be respected as a human being,
to be given the rights of a human being in this society,
on this earth, in this day,
which we intend to bring into existence
by any means necessary.
is for the Yippies
is for Zhou Enlai
I'm contradicting myself,
ending this "anarchist" pantheon with a Stalinist lieutenant of Mao
But I think of him the way I think of Gorbachev
or FDR, a man of the State who was saner, more humane, than the murdering lunatics around him.
While Mao presided over famines and mass executions, Zhou was building modern China.
​
This photo stays with me: Cultural Revolution, 1967. Mao takes his Central Committee backstage
at the Beijing Model Opera to hang out with the cast of The East Is Red. Actors still in stage makeup, ecstatically woke, chanting from the Red Book.
Only Zhou Enlai is staring blankly into space.
​
Mao is giving him the side-eye, checking to see if Zhou is sufficiently enthusiastic,
​
Zhou is struggling to keep from rolling his eyes,
his face a mask, longing to get back to real work.
